Arikana Chihombori-Quao
Arikana Chihombori-Quao is a Zimbabwean physician, diplomat, and activist. She served as the African Union's representative to the United States from 2016 to 2019. She is a prominent advocate of Pan-Africanism, and is outspoken about the legacy of the Berlin Conference, which she argues imposed artificial divisions on Africa whose effects persist today.
Quotes
[edit]"Arikana Chihombori-Quao: A profile in courage" (2020)
[edit]- "Arikana Chihombori-Quao: A profile in courage", The Guardian (January 1, 2020)
- We are the original people and we have every reason to stand up on the tallest mountains to proclaim who we are…We are beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated, highly adaptable and totally indestructible people – the Africans.
- Any other race that would have gone through what we’ve been subjected to would have been extinct and that’s the truth.
- Everybody is talking about the monkeys and the squirrels in the room, but no one wants to touch the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room, and that is our thinking, of the African people. How much do we understand our Africa? Why is it that the richest continent on Earth is painted as the poorest?
- France that the $500 billion you are taking out of Africa every year, no more. France needs to be the Third World developing country, not Africa. No more shall we continue to be exploited. France can no longer take $500 billion out of Africa.
- Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.
- Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a Third World power.
- In a giant pincer movement beginning around 1830 and ending on the eve of the First World war, France slowly but surely conquered most of West and Central Africa. Moving east from Dakar and south from Algiers the French military stole probably 40 per cent of the continent.
